Copilot in Outlook: Meeting Preparation Is About to Get Smarter

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Currently, the “Prepare for meetings with Copilot” feature requires at least three participants. Starting mid-October, this is changing. Copilot will soon support all meetings, including 1:1s. The rollout will begin in mid-October and is expected to complete by November 2025 according to the message center. With this update, you’ll also see new real-time insights in the Outlook meeting event form, summarizing relevant context, tasks, documents, and other resources. Plus, you’ll be able to chat with Copilot to confirm action items or better understand meeting goals. The more context Copilot has, the better it works. Meeting series with related emails, shared documents, Teams chats, and previous Copilot transcriptions deliver the richest experience. If your organization limits Copilot to in-meeting use only and deletes content afterward, you’ll miss out on much of this value. Here is a relevant " how to " guide for users.

Copilot Actions, rolling out

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Copilot Actions has been available through Copilot Studio for some time, and now, a version of this feature is being rolled out within Microsoft 365. This new integration offers a user-friendly way to automate and delegate common tasks.

The term "Actions" varies depending on the application. In Copilot Studio, it serves as a flexible tool for agents. By combining Copilot prompts and conversations, triggers (such as file modifications or scheduled reminders), and user-defined rules, Copilot Actions can generate artifacts that streamline workflows. A similar type of action is teased in the "lightweight" version of Copilot Studio within the M365 agent builder (marked as "coming soon").

The version discussed here is a new out-of-the-box functionality, designed to ensure that even users with minimal technical expertise can benefit from its powerful asynchronous capabilities.

To utilize Copilot Actions, users must have a Copilot license (priced at $30). The help article "Set up actions in Copilot to automate daily tasks" on Microsoft Support is a valuable resource for this purpose. The feature is already available in our production tenant, indicating that the rollout has begun.

I hope this feature continues to develop. Currently, it seems you can only run predefined tasks with limited adjustments to the queries. However, users can be taught to build their own agents and use triggers in Power Automate to initiate these agents.